Robots Are Alive And Well And Living In My House

This is really a follow on thought from the previous post about how the businesses of tomorrow will look more like a collection of integrated software programs than the classic image one has of businesses as groups of people working inside office buildings.

Back in the 1950s, western societies began to imagine the nascent utility of robotics as being something that possessed so much promise and whose prevalence would quickly become so pronounced that if we were to travel back in time to the 1950's, a random chap on the street would react with incredulity if we told him that we still didn't have robots in every home attending to housework by 2012.

The rise of a robot workforce was a logical if wrong-headed prediction to make, at least aside from their successful deployment on factory floors and industrial production lines. And it's another great example of how we initially perceive the innate usefulness of innovations through a lens that's governed by history rather than in a futuristic, abstracted sense.

So, while the rise of the the microelectronics revolution required to make robots spark into life was certainly accurate, the humanoid form its application would take was not.

And predicting we'd build anthropological form factors into which we'd pour the emerging electronics wizardry speaks more of 1950's society than the actual practical sense of consumer robots. Post-war popular culture is remembered for many things, but not least for its blossoming admiration for science fiction borne of an optimism to build a brave new utopia, free from war but set amid the context of a broader society that still operated on rules and principles from the Victorian industrial engineering era.

In that particular cultural petri dish it was therefore entirely logical that we'd naturally propagate the notion of perfectly utopian robot beings attending to dirty work we no longer cared much to do. Plus, we mostly perceived our 1950's world through the eyes of a mechanical engineer; ergo we easily imagined perfectly polished and engineered, intelligent robots.

Roll on sixty-odd years and robots are as prevalent in our society today as they were in the 1950's. So, what happened?

There's an extent to which one might be forgiven for feeling disappointed that we're not waited on hand and foot by shiny slaves, as if we've underacheived. Though while the anthropological form factor prediction was clearly wrong, I think everything else was more or less right. We just didn't possess the faculties to imagine how we'd deploy our new found automated intelligence.

Today's robots are just invisible software processes that manifest themselves in mostly mundane ways. They organise the processes that result in the things we purchase from Amazon landing on doorsteps the following day and they can deliver a million emails at the click of a single Send button or just wash our clothes to perfection.

Our 1950's robot future is alive and well and thriving in 2012, only they don't walk among us as much as we walk among them. They don't shake your hand with a clumsy metallic grip but they're just as polite, "Welcome to [Service Name], we're so glad you selected us, please be assured we won't disappoint you…", and they don't gently tap you on the shoulder while you're reading your sunday supplement to remind you that your TV license is about to expire, but they let you know all the same.

So, while we certainly built the complex software required to automate our robot society, we just chose to embed it in mostly abstract ways. Prior generations simply couldn't envision a utopian future that didn't manifestly feature hard engineering as the most likely conduit for the coming technological revolution.

But it's still here all the same, only in disembodied spirit form.

The Software Companies of Tomorrow

I've written before about why the way we often perceive innovation is impaired because we instinctively frame it in an historical context; how does an innovation compare with what came before, what is its differential impact today? That's an instinctive way of thinking that's just hard to avoid, so it usually takes a while before we are able to form a more complete picture of how certain innovations can go on to become much more impactful than we initially perceive, or lead on to subsequent more impactful iterations.

While it's true that the last fifty years has seen a huge wave of progressive computerization borne of the microprocessor revolution, and which has transformed many aspects of the modern world, I think it's also true that we are only just beginning to recognise the real potential of computerization. And the scale and impact of an emerging new wave of computerization will be several magnitudes greater than anything we've seen before.

Marc Andreessen puts this far better than I ever could, but I'm convinced that we'll look back at the first wave of computerization of the last fifty years as the application of very rudimentary technology to discrete and largely classic business processes. A necessary first step but, in the grand scheme, no big deal.

However we are now beginning to spot the faint signs of a second, much larger wave of emerging computerization where it will be possible to build an entirely different kind of buinesses entirely from scratch, and one that will sail above many of the classic constraints and disruptions historically faced by businesses.

These new businesses will only adopt the classic business processes and rules that are mandated to them by their trading environment (law, accounting, fiscal, etc.) but otherwise will employ many fewer people and will instead deploy software at every customer touch point and use software in a highly integrated way to drive all their administrative processes, enabling them to operate and scale in ways that would have been inconceivable even five years ago.

These hyperbusinesses of tomorrow will resemble software programs more than they will resemble classic businesses and will - 

• Distribute their products and services more efficiently and for a fraction of the historical go-to-market cost.
• Operate customer service models that require fewer resources and deliver better service. 
• Communicate effortlessly with any chosen audience.
• Scale their core operations incredibly efficiently.
• Decide to operate globally almost at a whim.
• Leverage the integrated nature of their business, customers and suppliers to drive new products, service models and value.
• Rapidly displace old world competitors in the same way the software driven word processor displaced the mechanical typewriter. 

Software might have started off as an innocuous tool you deployed inside a business, but tomorrow we'll be deploying businesses almost entirely in software.

Newtonian Apple

The most interesting thing about the iPhone 5 launch is not how little it's perceived to have changed over the prior generation, but why.

Roughly speaking, the iPhone accounts for around $60Bn of Apple's annual revenue, and that $60Bn is pretty cyclical in respect of the fact diehards upgrade every year and no-so-diehards every other year. Which means a huge chunk of that $60Bn is derived from existing customers and, more precisely, existing customers who know what they like. And they really like their iPhones.

So, you'd need brass balls to gamble $60Bn a year by making major deviations to a recipe that works. Which is a not insignificant problem for Apple.

We usually associate a lack of innovation with organisations that are in either decline or distress, or both, but the iPhone 5 is a great example of how creating the world's most successful product can lead to a situation where you need to deliberately retard innovation.

Which is actually a fascinating notion in the sense of Newton's third Law of Motion; where every action results in an equal and opposite reaction.